Pappy McFae offers kernel seeds to help get you started. Visit his website at kernel-seeds.org for more info.

If you prefer to manually configure and compile a kernel from source code directly, keep these things in mind:

You are touching the very low level aspects of a system, it is absolutely normal to have difficulties in properly setting up a kernel (in fact, configuring a Linux Kernel could be considered a bit of an art)

Take your time to investigate, it is a great occasion to Google a bit for some unknown notions (e.g. What is an I2C bus ? Hey, what is token ring ? What is a kernel module?).

When your first kernel configuration is done, you can reuse it as a basis of configuration

In case of doubt, keep the suggested defaults

If you want your system to boot, and your are not using an initrd, you'll need to build all boot-related filesystems and drivers into the kernel directly rather than as modules.